Lose The Game - Finchley Central Correspondence

In early 2006 Mike Codling emailed us this orgin theory:

Three young men, following a heavy night out in the west end, accidentally took the wrong branch on the northern line, and found themselves stranded at East Finchley. As they had no money, they decided to wait on the platform until the first morning service to take them back into town. To help the time pass, they decided to play a game, and one suggested that they should try to forget about where they were, and that they were playing a game, and the first one to think about the game, or about East Finchley, was the loser.

Over a year later, on 20th September 2007, we were contacted by Adrian McCrickard:

The 'East Finchley' story has some elements of the truth in it, although it was actually called 'Finchley Central'.

The game was taught to me by one of the three guys on the platform that night. They were just waiting for the train after a night out. Obviously you can't stay in the station all night as they were closed after 12ish. Unfortunately, I cannot remember his name (if it comes to me, i'll let you know) but he was a scientist (physics I think) from Esher. He had a yellow Triumph Spitfire and collected vintage port. This was in 1982 and I seem to remember it was invented while he was at university which would have made it 1979-81.

More than another year passed until, on 4th December 2008, an article about The Game was published in the Metro. It should be noted that we have verified the email addresses of these Cambridge academics, so for this to be a hoax, they would all have to be involved.

From Philip Brice:

A game suspiciously identical to The Game was invented in 1976 in the Horse and Groom in Kings Street in Cambridge one evening at the regular weekly meeting of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS). Richard Pinch knew John Conway, the well-known father of "combinatorial game theory" - and the conversation moved on from John Conway, to game theory, and then to von Neumann's definition of what made a game, which was something like:

* The people playing the game must know they are playing it;
* The rules must be known by everyone playing the game;
* There must be an agreed method for defining who has won.

So everyone tried to think of things we thought of as games that did not meet all these criteria. After abandoning the idea of games with random rules and games that had no clear winner, the idea developed of a game in which you didn't know you were competing in until you weren't.

The aim was to avoid thinking about a particular thing - Finchley Central was seen as something that one would not normally think about, and was slightly comical, and so became the thing not to think about. On thinking about it, you had lost, were out of the game, and would indicate this by sticking your arm in the air. All the other players (generally a group of fellow CUSFS people who were present, aware of the existence of the game, and were awake/sentient) then had to avoid thinking about why someone had just stuck their arm in the air - the game generally was over in a minute or so and a surprised victor crowned - to nobody else's surprise.

Philip Brice then contacted another member of CUSFS, Mark Haslett, who emailed us to explain:

I am the person identified by Adrian McCrickard. I have been playing Finchley Central since 1976 or 77. At the time it had only one rule which is: if you ever think of Finchley Central you lose. It was played extensively by members of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society many of the veterans of that time will greet each other with the words "I lose". I forget exactly who invented it but I think it may have been Nick Lowe in answer to the problem of creating a simple game that was not amenable to Game Theory (see John Conway) analysis. It is likely that Richard Pinch or possibly [anonymous] posed the question or indeed invented the game. At the time we did not realise what a viral concept it was and I continue to lose from time to time now 30 years on.

Mark also confirmed that he was from Esher and owned a yellow Spitfire.

We then emailed Nick Lowe and received the following reply:

It was a kind of zen version of Mornington Crescent originally conceived by the great games theorist John Horton Conway (then at Trinity, now at Princeton) as an example of a game that his theory of games couldn't describe mathematically. The rules were peculiarly elegant in their simplicity: players take turns to name a tube station, and the first to say Finchley Central wins. It can be a surprisingly satisfying game to play.

Over the years Mark and I evolved a variant under which whoever thinks of the game first loses. Our meetings are still punctuated, and often opened, with the words "Gah! I lose."